TIM Holden does most of his digging in his back garden these days but he still loves to get his hands dirty examining new archaeological finds.

As he co-ordinates the Headland Archaeology team in cataloguing pottery fragments unearthed on the M74 extension project, Holden carefully examines each small piece, noting thumb prints and decoration’s etched by an ancient fingernail.

The key to piecing together the fragments into a whole is often based upon those tiny details.

The UK managing director said: “We often uncover a lot of Bronze Age pottery, which is patterned using the thumb print and the thumb nail. “Although these finds are in themselves not hugely significant, when linked with what is already known about the area it helps to build a more complete picture of the lifestyle and habits of the people who lived there thousands of years ago.

“If we were to just bulldoze over these sites, then we run the risk of losing vital information on how our culture and society has developed over the years.

“You only have to see the number of new sites unearthed during the Edinburgh tram works to see just how easy it is to lose track of our past, despite some of the finds unearthed recently on that project being less than 100 years old.

“The contractors are digging up areas of Edinburgh which the city curator already knows may house significant historical finds.

“However records were so poorly maintained it’s difficult to know with any certainty what is under the ground without actually digging it up, and that’s why the work is delayed when something is unexpectedly unearthed.”

Holden launched Headland in Edinburgh with three fellow archaeologists in 1996 as a commercial firm offering clients assessment, monitoring and excavation services for proposed construction projects.

In the early years the bulk of revenue came from public sector work the focus has turned more commercial following a raft of legislative controls to better protect archaeological finds.

Holden said “We all had complimentary skills to draw expertise from over a wide range of subject matters, and we thought we could put our minds together collectively to do something different on a commercial scale.

“Our first big contract win was on a Historic Scotland woodland grants scheme, which took us all over Scotland.

“That was probably the best job we ever had because we were surveying some of the remotest parts of Scotland for archaeological remains up on the hills before trees were planted.

“That contract lasted for six years, and then we started to see some small commercial projects come in after the legislation on dealing with archaeological finds was tightened up.

“However the real turning point for Headland was the work on the Scottish Parliament, which gave us a lot of positive exposure in the construction sector.

“The Parliament was a joint venture with a company from Perth but we had to take on another 30 people to complete the work.

“At that point we had around 10 staff, but we then brought in a new partner who was very commercially driven to help us grow the commercial side of the business.

“Our work on the Scottish Parliament was really the start of our commercial expansion because we proved to ourselves capable of completing work on time and within budget on really large projects.”

Engineering and construction firms now take a more proactive approach to the planning of major construction projects. Archaeological pre-construction assessments and route planning is seen as a priority for planners. As new wind farms, tidal and wave powered projects get underway in Scotland, Headland is carrying out impact assessments and helping planners focus construction away from areas of archaeological significance.

Holden said: “Legislation has tightened up over the years, but before 1996 all a planner had to do before developing a greenfield site was consult the Royal Commission records on the area for known archaeological monuments.

“So we moved from a system which targeted known monuments up until 1996, to councils now requiring an evaluation of up to eight per cent of an area before construction can begin.

“The last thing a developer wants is for those unknown monuments to turn up in the middle of a construction phase, because that equates to cost for them, and the delays from a significant find can be months rather than days.

“Our job is to keep the construction delays down to an absolute minimum, and a four or five hectare site takes about a week to assess.

“If we find something then we have to go back to the curator to work out a strategy, and then pile people into the site to get the excavation work done quickly.

“But there are deeper projects, especially in the Old Town of Edinburgh, which can take months to go through.

“Most of the monuments at those sites are already known about, but the problems arise for developers when they stray into an unknown monument site.

“At the moment we are doing environmental impact assessments for windfarm projects in Scotland.

“There is also a requirement for the heritage of the offshore wind farm sites to be assessed in terms of wrecks and buried landscapes in these areas, so there is a lot of work out there still to be won.”

At the moment Headland employs more than 100 full-time staff across Scotland and Southern Ireland. The boom in new road building and infrastructure projects proved a lucrative revenue stream but expansion into Ireland almost bankrupted the company.

Holden said: “For a time in Ireland we were definitely over trading, and we had no real control of our outgoings or cashflow which ended up being a very steep learning curve for us.

“The demand for our services was outstripping supply as Ireland’s infrastructure development was screaming out for archaeologists in order to push the work forward.

“Because we had started the company without knowing much about the business development side, when we moved into Ireland in 2002 we were still running the business like we’d run the budget in our own homes – basically saving and spending what we had in the bank rather than borrowing.

“The market was really huge, and some of the roads projects we worked on were multi-million pound developments.

“But all of a sudden had to get 100 people on site within a day or two who we had to pay weekly, but then we were covering those salaries for up to 12 weeks between invoicing.

“At one point we had more than 400 people working for us and managing staff in those numbers proved to be a real headache for us.

“If anything, Ireland taught us power of borrowing wisely to develop our business, and within two years the Irish arm of the company was generating turnover in excess of our entire UK operation.

“We identified serious problems with the way we were running things, so we brought in a financial director to manage the company cash flow, and that was the first step we took to becoming a proper commercial business.”

Headland has been directly involved in some of the most significant archaeological finds in Scotland. One of the most famous was the Newbridge Chariot in Edinburgh.

Holden said: “Some of the most significant finds we have made really don’t look like much, so a fairly small Neolithic site, which could be up to 6000 years old, doesn’t look like much when you find it but it adds so much to the academic knowledge of the period.

“Everything we find, even small pieces of pottery has to be catalogued for the Treasure Trove, which is managed by the National Museums of Scotland, before being sent to a receiving museum for further investigation.

“One of the most significant finds in our history was the Newbridge Chariot, which we believe was used for a chieftain burial.

“A workman using a mechanical digger unearthed the find at the Edinburgh Interchange Industrial Estate in 2004.

“At the time it was one of the most significant Iron Age finds ever discovered in Britain, but when it was discovered it was really little more than discoloured patches in the soil.

“Fortunately the archaeologist we had on site spotted the find before there was too much damage done. It may have been lost forever had we not had an expert on site.

“But because of the very wet weather and acidic soil, the wood materials used to make the chariot had dissolved, but we found from the samples we took it had been used for the burial of someone who was very important in their community thousands of years ago.

“The bones themselves had dissolved due to the climate, as had most of the metal and all of the wood, and all that was left was the different discolourations of the soil which told us if it was wood, metal or bone in the soil.

“We actually took that out as a single block to excavate back at the national museum, and they made a full sized reconstruction of the chariot for display.”

Although the construction sector is still suffering Holden hopes to capitalise on major public infrastructure works with a move into road building, bridges, hospitals and house building projects. However he believes keeping Headland’s 100 full-time staff is essential if the company is to compete for large infrastructure projects.

He said: “We now see ourselves as a company structured to do the big jobs, and we simply can’t afford to let our key staff go as we have invested so much in training them.

“We have a core business to look after, which means we will always have some development work to be getting on with, and that can be down jobs as little as a house extension.

“The majority of our staff are also shareholders in the company, and as they are the most important asset we have, we felt it was important to reward their hard work, and although things are lean at the moment, the money we saved during the boom years is being used to pay our staff through this lean period.

“If we started cutting back on staff now, we would lose our position as a company geared towards taking on the largest infrastructure projects.

“England has the potential to generate millions of pounds in revenue for us, because it is not uncommon for a road project to come in at £5m.

“We are currently toe-dipping into England, Northern Ireland, Aberdeen and some of the English regions at the moment, but ideally I’d rather have people on the ground to develop relationships with the planners to better service the needs of our clients.

“There are also a number of large projects coming up in Eastern Europe we’d like to get involved in, and we're developing well in those areas. “In the back of my mind I hope we are the first archaeology company to be floated on the stock exchange, but we still have a bit of growing to do before that happens.”